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August 30, 2007

Essential™

Essential™

Hey, the idea was sound.

There's a very good reason why Vaputech's Department of Advertising, Memetic Theory, and Suicide Prevention Prevention (motto: "You only think that you think that thought you just thought. We thought that thought that you just thought that you thought for you, so if you think that you can think any thought that you think that you might want to think, well, think again. Or... don't, because we think that we'll do a much better job doing your thinking for you from now on, don't you think? DON'T ANSWER THAT") has the smallest budget in Technology's organization. For one thing, the above is one of their more coherent mottos. It's not that DAMTSPP (trust me, in Helltongue the acronym's a killer pun) personnel are stupid; it's more that they typically have the sorts of baroque minds that can very easily spiral inward into new and exciting forms of insanity. This would be less of a problem if they didn't work for a Superior that experiments with physical laws by jumping up and down on them. The last thing Vaputech - or Hell - needs is people who can find innovative ways to court disaster; the ones that they have now are quite sufficient, thanks. So, Sparky (otherwise known as Vapula's keeper) maintains a firm upper limit on DAMTSPP's budget. Unfortunately, the department in question resents being starved for income, so it decided to go make some, literally. Specifically, they decided to come up with an ersatz form of Essence.

So they did. This was widely considered to be impossible - but hold on for a second: what, precisely, is Essence? Yes, yes, "the energy of life," a very pretty idea, and one almost certainly not ripped off from a certain classic space opera. But what does that mean?

Don't feel bad if you don't know. DAMTSPP's staff didn't have a clue, either. What they did know was that you could use Essence for fueling Songs, supernatural abilities, and affecting random probability. So all they needed to do was find something that could do all of that, preferably reliably, possibly better, definitely cheaply. What they came up with was a compound of several elements that are only found in Hell. The exact proportions are still secret (more accurately, every demon known to know the proportions is dead, and if any Demon Prince knows what it is, he, she, or it isn't talking), and the stuff is impossible to analyze when active and dissipates once used. But it was reliable and it was cheap, so DAMTSPP was certain that they had a winner on their hands. They happily marketed it as Essential™, gave out a bunch of free samples, and watched as every demon in Hell clamored for it.

Now, Servitors of Trade would be laughing at this point and making snide comments about what happened to the Spanish Empire once they dumped two continents' worth of gold and silver into one smallish country's economic ecosystem, but what actually happened was possibly even more amusing. Essence, while a currency (more or less), is also a commodity, which means that people will eventually use it. People will use it for things like Songs or probability manipulation, which meant that eventually people would be using it for actions known to occasionally trigger either a Divine or an Infernal Intervention.

And apparently, neither God nor Lucifer approves of Essential™.

The bad things didn't happen at first, mind - but after a certain number of Interventions took place the universal disapproval of Essential™ by the Powers That Be became clear. Any Intervention that affects a demon that either spent a note of Essential™ (or even has absorbed one) will immediately destroy him, her or it. There have been no exceptions to this below the level of Prince - and the one Prince who was hit with this problem was emphatically not happy about it afterwards, which is not coincidentally why none of the original demons who knew how to make this stuff are around anymore. Presumably an angel would be likewise affected; however, between Marc and Dominic (Servitors of the latter have discovered that their training video of this particular Don't Let This Happen To You is actually the ticket to certain party invitations, these days) it's a rare angel that isn't clued-in to how dangerous this stuff is. Besides, Essential™ just feels... wrong, to an angel. Slimy. Diseased. Ticking.

Interestingly, Essential™ is still being made. All of the above discusses what happens to celestials who attract Interventions while using the stuff (ethereals have the same problem, although it's harder to assess the toughness of entities that implode if an anthropologist looks at them too closely). Mortals - usually, damned souls - aren't affected as badly by the Intervention problem. All that happens to them is that they lose whatever Essence they have and get knocked out for a few hours. There are damned souls that would cheerfully pay for that particular privilege right there - but somehow the knowledge on how to make Essential™ got out into General Population, and now it is becoming a true underground currency in Shal-Mari, Stygia and (just recently) Hades. It's mostly traded among damned souls, which makes things even more problematic. Any damned soul of six Forces can learn Songs, after all: and with enough Essential™, he or she will be able to actually pay somebody to teach him or her. Five Force damned souls will just pay for the desired Song, instead. And there are a lot of damned souls in Hell, and not enough demons to keep every one of them under full observation, so there's the possibility of quite a little black market, there. The aforementioned laughing Servitors of Trade are looking forward to seeing whether Gresham's Law applies to the celestial plane as well; interestingly, the Saint who created said law has a small bet with his Superior over which one is the "bad" money...

Comments

*howls and chortles and giggles and glees*

Wicked. Very, very wicked. Any bets as to whether some clever angel of Trade might have (or want to have) a backup of the recipe, to be released if anyone actually *does* manage to stamp it out in Hell?